Blog
RE:Play – Gabriel Knight 1
They don’t make boxes like that anymore REPOST: “I dreamt of blood upon the shore, of eyes that spoke of sin. the lake was smooth and deep and black, as was her scented skin…” -Gabriel Knight Cliche: defined as “an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being trite or irritating, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel.” Dirty little secret of...
Ghosts of Bad Lands Trailer Drop
Arizona native and pulp fiction addict Razorfist new comic just had its trailer drop. I'll be reviewing it as soon as I feel better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvqB8OukFNw
RE:Play – Quest for Glory 1: So You Want to Be a Hero
REPOST: I'm going to be laid up for a while which means I'm in rerun mode. Enjoy these blasts from the past. Or don't, because either way this is what you're getting. Today the monsters of PC gaming are well known to all Steam, EA, Sony, and biggest fish in any pond Microsoft. Huge multi-billion dollar corporations chugging out carefully crafted and polished money extraction software. Modern games require the kind of budget that epic blockbusters are made of. Quora estimated that...
RE:View – Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Most sequels follow in the footsteps of a massively successful first movie. This film on the other hand was born from the ashes of Star Trek the Motion Picture. While STMP isn’t the best movie in the series, it is pretty far from the worst. If you have a chance to see Robert Wise’s Director’s Cut, it’s definitely worth a look. It was however horrifically expensive to make. It cost $35 million and back in 1979 that was a studio-breaking amount of money. Michael Eisner hated spending...
First Impression: Fallout
2024 is going to be called the Year of the Unadaptable Movie. Although this one is a TV show. The Fallout franchise definitely falls in this category. Fallout was sort of obsolete when it first came out. I don’t mean the semi-turned-based role-playing thing, Fallout started life as a tribute band version of Wasteland so the interface was kind of a necessity. Besides, that's how mid-90s computer RPGs worked. That was what Black Isle did best, this was the studio that...
RE:View – The Last American Virgin
Don't be fooled by this poster The Seventies were horrible in every way imaginable. From the musical incompetence of Wall of Sound to the solipsistic non-philosophy of Easy Rider, to your older sister’s boyfriend’s creepy-ass custom van with the shag carpeting that smelled…funny. There was nothing that wasn’t vomitable. Even the clothing and food were wrong. Polyester ravaged the land for an entire decade, (Hell, your Dad’s leisure suit was packed with the stuff). As for the kitchen it was ruled...
WEBToons In Trouble with Creators… Again
I’ll have to start this post with the disclaimer that Arktoons is a competitor of WEBToons.com. My wife just finished with her newest K-drama, Marry My Husband. The plot is that all men are garbage unless they are handsome and rich, however, the important part is that this very popular TV show started life on WEBToons. It’s far from the only one out there. There are now better than 20 of the things out in the wild and that number...
Cheap Thrills: Lethal Company
Lethal Company is a lot of game for ten bucks. You may have heard of it. I had not. I just picked it up as a part of a Steam Sale. Lethal Company's "plot" Is that you are working for a deep space salvage company, called "The Company." You go to various moons to find salvage and bring it aboard your ship... Without being eaten. That's important because being eaten is a significant limiter on your ability to meet quota. But don't worry...
Bob Iger Claims We Don’t Know What Woke Means
From Vanity Fair: “The term woke is thrown around rather liberally,” Iger said. “I think a lot of people don’t really understand what it means.” I do, Bob! I do! Shall I tell you what it means? Given that you’ve a got a rich Boomers grasp of the social issues surrounding it, you probably do need some help. It seems like the least I could do after all the low hanging fruit you’ve fed me for years. Now to be clear, I do realize...
RE:View Star Trek The Motion Picture
One of my earliest memories is the landing of Apollo 11. My parents woke me up for it and dragged me downstairs so that I could wobble bleary-eyed on my father’s lap as Eagle came down to rest at Tranquility Base. I couldn’t make out what Armstrong said. The interference was bad that morning. But even at that age, I knew that I had just watched something that was supposed to be important. Because everyone kept telling me it was. Apollo 11 was...
Helldivers II Tips
It's Friday night, the day is almost gone and I'm only now just getting a chance to write a post. This is going to be a fast one. I. If you need to take dive hit yourself with a stim first. It takes a few seconds to complete its cycle and that will usually negate fall damage. II. Some planets have those Pod Things That Go Boom. They will, depending on circumstances the loyal Sons of Super Earth are familiar with by now,...
Skydance is Likely to Buy Paramount
I was too steamed over yesterday's news to notice that #TheDarkHeraldWasRight again. As I had guessed, Shari Redstone was just using David Zaslav to get David Ellison to see things her way. Skydance has entered into exclusive talks with Paramount with a view towards a merger. This is by no means a guarantee but Redstone is hot to sell and Skydance is hot to buy, so this is now just negotiating. Warner Brothers was never a serious contender, even though Zaslav is...
Clown World Keeps Hold of Disney
At about 9:00 AM Eastern someone at Disney broke the law. A leak from a source that was clearly viewed as reliable by the business press, claimed that Disney had enough votes to hold off giving Nelson Peltz a seat on the Walt Disney Company board of directors. The only reason to do this was to support the Iger slate. This is a felony offense. The SEC has always come down very hard on leaks like this in the past but I...
The Dark Herald Recommends – Godzilla X Kong: New Empire
I’ll begin with the obvious, this film is no Godzilla Minus One. It’s not even close to that good but you knew that just looking at the trailers. However, this is a completely different kind of movie that’s meant for a different audience. If you watched Porky’s and were expecting Saving Private Ryan, that screw-up is all on you. Same thing applies here. If you went to an American Godzilla movie and expected something from Toho, you should have managed...
RE:View – The Last Jedi
You would have to be Glob’s perfect retard to not recognize that this is easily the greatest Star Wars movie of all time. There is literally nothing that this film got wrong. I am left near to weeping just thinking about the perfection that is Ryan Johnson’s magnum opus. The closest thing to a problem is the opening score. John Williams's bombastic and overbearing Star Wars Main Title. This ridiculously overblown tone poem of a score has been assaulting the ears...
Kong Vs. Godzilla (Part One)
BUMPED 3/31/2024 In a pre-Star Wars universe, guys in silly rubber costumes tramping around flimsy sets were awesome. Give a kid a bunch of cardboard boxes and a crayon and within minutes there were would be a Tokyo skyline. All ready to be stomped flat by a hunched over boy, who occasionally interruppted the carnage to give his mighty Godzilla roar. When I was nine, my only sources of income were scouring parking lots for dropped change, returning pop bottles, and (for one summer)...
Blogs and Ends: Disney the Dismal Update
Next week we will see if Nelson Peltz and Jay Rosulo get seats on the Disney board of directors. While this does not mean that Bob Iger will automatically leave the company if they win, it will be seen as a body blow to his prestige. Worse still he will not be leaving on his own terms, assuming he was ever planning to leave at all. He has an advisory contract that is slated to go into effect the moment he goes...
First Impressions: Netflix’s Three Body Problem
This is not a review of the whole series, it is just my first impressions of the first couple of episodes. Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu was the last Hugo-winning novel of the year that will ever enjoy any real broad spectrum respect from actual readers as opposed to the literary community. The translation of the first book of Liu’s Remembrance of Earth Past trilogy arrived in the middle of the Great Puppy War. It was so good it enjoyed...
Disney Folds to Florida
Disney's lawsuit was always about public relations. There wasn't the slightest hope in hell that the US judicial system would throw out the entire body of American property law for the benefit of Bob Iger. Not that there wasn't a lot of media retards predicting that would happen. Well, it didn't. I'll give this much to Mickey the Great and Terrible, the embarrassment of this stupidity was kept to a minimum. With the shareholder vote only days away, Iger apparently decided this one...
The Dark Herald Was Wrong, Iger Should Dump ESPN
On September 7, 1979, Lee Leanard said the first words ever heard on ESPN, "If you're a fan, if you're a fan, what you'll see in the next minutes, hours, and days to follow may convince you you've gone to sports heaven." Leanard had no way of knowing just how right he was. The Rasmussen family (not the famous one) had come up with the idea of a cable network for local sports events in Connecticut. It turned out it was...
Book Discussion: The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu
The Wandering Earth is an anthology of novellas by Cixin Liu, the (2015) Hugo Award-winning author of the Three-Body Problem. Which incidentally was the last time the Hugos reflected the voice of the entire fandom instead just 300-pound, purple-haired weirdos. I found this collection as intriguing as the Three Body for similar reasons. When I read his first novel, I was honestly rather surprised by what he was able to get away with in Communist China. That book began with an unflinching look...
The Dark Herald Recommends – Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Ivan Reitman’s early years in Hollywood are something he would have liked swept as far under the carpet as possible. His Salad Days body of work included such titles as Columbus of Sex, Cannibal Girls, Rabid (starring Marilyn Chambers in her only non-pornographic role), Shivers, and that groundbreaking classic, Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia. These movies were all slightly better than they had any right to be, but it looked like he was never going to find his way out of...
3D Realms Will Die Free
I’m trying to put this in a positive light but I’m having trouble lighting the candle. As is well known, Embracer Group put it all on the wrong horse.. The Embracer bought up everything under the sun with the intention of selling itself to Amazon for well over a billion dollars. Except that Amazon sobered up, took a horrified look at the “sweeper” they had woken up next to, stole back the engagement ring on the nightstand, and jumped out of the nearest...
Top Ten FPS Shotguns (part 1)
The Coach Gun, the Trench Broom, the Boom Stick, the Brixton Typewriter? (Seriously?) Most commonly called the shotgun. All but harmless at a distance yet so terrifying at close quarters that the Kaiser’s Wehrmacht tried to get it banned by the Geneva Conventions, (Silly Germans, America has never signed the Geneva Convention). Still a staple of the military, police, and home defense. To say nothing of the First Person Shooter. It’s honestly close to impossible to picture this genre of game...
RE:View Terminator 2 – Judgment Day
Whatever Faustian bargain James Cameron seems to have made for his early mega successes with The Terminator and Aliens came due with The Abyss. Despite positive reviews and a pretty decent story, the film was an abject disaster at the box office. If there’s one thing that Hollywood loves more than overnight riches, it’s a meteoric fall. The wolves were scratching at James Cameron’s door. Everyone was wondering, was this guy just a one-hit-wonder? At that point in his career, Cameron needed...
George Lucas Turns to the Dark Side
“Creating magic is not for amateurs. I remain a significant shareholder because I have full faith and confidence in the power of Disney and Bob’s track record of driving long-term value. I have voted all of my shares for Disney’s 12 directors and urge other shareholders to do the same.” - George Lucas A lot of people are shrieking but I’m not one of them. I did make a joke about Lucas backing Peltz a while back, but I wasn’t serious...
The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Damsel
It’s always obvious when a genre has outstayed it’s welcome. In 1969, Hello, Dolly! was launched into a world where the innocence of the high-production Broadway musical film was no longer welcome. The Sixth Day was arguably Arnold Schwarzenegger’s best 80s-style blast flick but no one was interested by 2000. So it is with Damsel. This film feels like an intriguing artifact. A leftover from another time. It has arrived as another genre whose time is passed. However, and this is...
Star Wars Has Made Disney $13 Billion?!?!?
That pitch to Disney shareholders has been a barrel of laughs. Bob Iger has to be feeling like he is standing in Michael Eisner's shoes twenty years ago. Just about every one of Eisner's fatal problems has an analog today. ABC Capital Cities was assimilated by the Mickey-Borg in 1996. Part of the reason that Murphy and Burke decided to let Michael Eisner buy the company was because they had promised Bob Iger that he would become CEO of ABC Capital Cities when...
RE:View – The Terminator
Los Angeles 2029: There is nothing but rubble, mountains of skulls and gigantic killing machines rolling through the streets gunning down the last few remaining inhabitants of LA. “YEAH SKYNET!! GIT SUM! GIT SUM! YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! HOO-RA-A-AH!” “Dear, please quit rooting for the terminators,” The Mother of the Darkspawn sighed. “It’s bothering the children.” “Nah, we’re cool with it, Mom,” replied Darkspawn. Before Westworld came along the Robot Apocalypse used to be cool. The Machines weren’t angsty at all. They just wanted to...
The Latest Round of Disney White Papers
We have two more white paper filings to the SEC in fast approaching showdown between Nelson Peltz’s Trian group and Robert Iger’s tame board of directors that he wants to keep tame. Peltz’s filing was a thorough 130 page evisceration of the Walt Disney Company’s failings. Trian is the opposition. His pitch for himself and Jay Rasulo being on the board is made on a strong business track record. Since Bob Iger can’t possibly stand on his own merits in 2024, he has...
Walt Disney World Investments SLASHED!!!
Oops. Bob Iger's supporters said the quiet part out loud. The Disney Company has released an editorial reply to Nelson Peltz and Trian's white paper. Mickey and Great and Terrible's own white paper is kind of an embarrassment. Disney seems to have convinced itself its financial legerdemain is so brilliant no one could hope to penetrate it. Well, I did, and so did anybody else that wasn't high on Pixie-Dust. One of Bob Iger's big claims for the park is that he...
The Head of Imagineering Has Been Fired!
When a business wants an announcement spread far and wide it’s made on Monday early in the afternoon. When a company doesn’t want to bring attention to it, it’s made on a Friday at 4:40 in the afternoon. When a company wants a piece of news buried six feet deep, with a layer of peat moss thrown on top, they announce it on a Saturday. On Saturday afternoon Barbara Bouza, the president of Walt Disney Imagineering announced her departure. They at least...